Two Hard Drives failed on me in one day :(
 

My Firewire box with 4 drives has had one 3 month old 400gig drive suddenly show as unformatted (ie, loss of all data) and another has reported that it's running on its last legs and needs backing up immediately! :(

Running Mac Leopard here. Any ideas if there is a one box multiple drive RAID that I can use for the most important data that plugs in via Firewire 800 or USB2? I'm not a tech so need something that covers a drive going down.

Any ideas very welcome!

Mike

Not sure about Firewire or USB2, but there are NAS drives that do as you wish. They will just hook into your network, gigabit would be recommended.

Had a quick look, is this the sort of thing you are wanting?

Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition 1TB External Firewire 400/800/USB 2.0 16MB Cache Hard Drive - Retail (STM310004OTDB06-RK)

That's the sort of thing! Thanks! Still in shock at so many drives going in one day.

Do you have another enclosure, perhaps even just a single drive one? If so, pop the failed drives in it and check they are actually failing. I say this because I have a Macally enclosure for IDE drives, which used to contain my 320GB backup drive, however a few weeks ago the drive failed to mount. I tried the enclosure on another machine to make sure it wasn't something with the firewire ports on the iMac. Nope, still failed on another machine.

I decided to swap it into one of my other enclosures and the drive mounted without issue. I tried another drive in the Macally enclosure and it failed to mount that drive, so I'm fairly sure it's some issue with the enclosure, hence why I mention trying the drives in another enclosure as it might be the device rather than the drive.

Good point from Markus. It can happen that a few drives go down at the same time. Have a think about where the enclosure is, has it overheated for example?

Most hard drives don't like going over 40C for it to last a long life.

I stopped buying maxtor drive's when I lost 4 in a couple of months :(

i posted this previously, looks :cool:

Data Robotics, Inc. | Drobo in Action

Steve, thanks for that link - that looks just like what I want. Now to find one, today!

Interesting point as I shuffled the drives around to check there wasn't an issue and it may be the enclosure. It's a double fan cooled enclosure but after seeing the Drobo info I think I know what I am going to do now.

Ordered one :) Hmm, my old stylee drives may not be compatible with a SATA enclosure? Oh well...

Looks interesting :thumb:

ebay

Quite a good review HERE a few pros & cons

That Drobo does look good. Going to have to read the reviews to see the point to it. I just don't need that much external storage.

Hopefully mine will be on Tuesday as will 4 x 500 Gb drives. I'll post a report.

BTW, I was going to get a few 1 Tb drives but thought it may be more flexible to have the 500's for the moment.

Wow, you have serious USB storage needs :eek:

I'd want a way to transfer my data faster than that. I currently have a 300Gb USB2 enclosure, and that is slow enough. My Gigabit NAS drive is a step better, but its still not really up to the job. For some reason it never uses more than 15% of my gigabit connection :(

It's all the video that I do and the amount of pics I take :freak3:

I'm running leopard here (unfortunatley :( ) and I've got two Lacie USB drives. One 500GB used for Time Machine and another 320GB for 'stuff'
I now can't use the 320 as with it plugged in, it regularly disappears from the Desktop, causes the machine to grind to a halt. If I unmount the 320 the machine fires back into life again.
Don't necessarily dismiss the drives as faulty just yet... :(

I downloaded the free trial of Data Rescue and it showed all the content. After a good look I was sure that all of those files were backed up so didn't need to pay the $99 for the full software to actually copy off the data!

I know what you mean about Leopard, I'm not convinced upgrading from Tiger was worth it.